Monday, July 25, 2016

Will the existence of "damaged data" help
overturn a verdictin a drug smuggling case against five fishermen?Actually, the vessel was fitted with an Olex navigational aid that tracked and recorded its movements. It is unlikely that any actual drug- running ship would have made carried such a system, because it provided an accurate record of exactly where it had been.

In 2011, a group of men from the
Isle of Wight was given a combined 104-year prison sentence for
masterminding a £53m drug smuggling operation.

Does new evidence suggest
they were innocent?

A new lawyer, Emily Bolton, is working on their case and believes that may be the case.

"It's like living in a ridiculous police drama," Sue Beere says.
Her
husband Jonathan Beere is serving 24 years in a high-security prison in
the Midlands, convicted of organising a complex operation to smuggle a
quarter of a tonne of cocaine into the UK.
She vividly remembers
the day police came to arrest him in January 2011: "They literally came
through the door in the morning... a troop of men."

All she could think was that they had made "some stupid mistake" over his identity, and found the wrong man.
She
says local police stopped to comfort her young son, saying: "Don't cry
nipper, be brave, daddy will be home tonight."
But Jonathan Beere has
not been back home since that day, and has so far served five years in
jail.

Two of the other men, skipper Jamie Green and Zoran Dresic, also
received 24-year sentences, while Daniel Payne received 18 years and
Scott Birtwistle 14. They had been charged with conspiring to import
Class A drugs.
Now a new lawyer, Emily Bolton, is working on their case.
She
founded the Innocence Project New Orleans in the US, which has so far
freed 25 prisoners, and has recently set up a new charity in the UK -
the Centre for Criminal Appeals - to specialise in miscarriage of
justice investigations.

Electronic navigation records (middle & right) show Green’s boat was never where
the prosecution claimed it was (left) – cruising in the wake of the
container ship Oriane in the Channel, to collect drugs thrown overboard

What happened in the Channel?

On
29 May 2010, a small fishing boat - the Galwad-Y-Mor - left the Isle of
Wight on what the crew claim was a routine trip to catch lobster and
crab in the Channel.

That night, a large drugs operation led by the Serious Organised
Crime Agency (Soca) - known as Operation Disorient - was taking place,
involving surveillance planes, a Border Agency patrol boat and police
lookouts along the coast.
The authorities had intelligence that
cocaine was being smuggled to Europe from South America on giant cargo
ships, such as the container vessel MSC Oriane - which was one of nine
from Brazil that appeared to be of particular interest.
At about
midnight, the ship and the fishing boat briefly came close together -
though exactly how close is disputed. The ship went on towards the
European mainland, and the Galwad continued home, past Freshwater Bay -
the western tip of the Isle of Wight.
The next day, at this same
bay, a member of the public spotted 11 sacks tangled around a buoy -
each packed with a pure form of cocaine.
The prosecution's case
was that the sacks were pushed off the side of the container ship for
the fishermen to retrieve from the sea, before taking them to the bay to
hide or be picked up by another vessel.

MSC Oriane

But Ms Bolton disputes this.
"What the police are alleging [is
that the Galwad] was able to pinpoint and locate 11 bags of cocaine in
the English Channel, in shipping lanes, in the middle of the night in a
storm," she says.
"We think we now have the evidence proving this simply couldn't have taken place."

Navigational data

At
the trial, the prosecution relied on navigational data taken from
on-board computers on the two vessels, which purported to show that -
around midnight - the Galwad crossed the Oriane's wake. There would have
been a short window for the 11 sacks of cocaine to be transferred to
the fishing boat.
However, Ms Bolton says the prosecution's expert witness left out key plot points and used damaged data.

Her new analysis suggests the paths of the boats were never closer
than 100m from one another, and that the sea's drift would have taken
the drugs away from the fishermen's boat.
"If that intersection between the vessels never took place, there is no case," she says.

The men's fishing boat, the Galwad, has not seen the sea for years

The prosecution also points to a series of calls made to and from the
satellite phone on the Galwad while it was in the Channel, suggesting
someone on shore was co-ordinating the drugs drop. The defence said the
timing was a coincidence and someone was just checking on the health of
one of the other fishermen who was seasick - a migrant from Eastern
Europe.
No traces of cocaine were ever found on the fishing boat, despite it being searched with specialised equipment.
The
container ship, the Oriane, was also searched when it next touched
British shores a few days later, but no trace of drugs was ever found.
No-one on the Oriane was arrested.

Cliff-top surveillance

The Galwad spent 18 hours sailing back to its home port of Yarmouth
in the Isle of Wight. On the way it stopped for about an hour in
Freshwater Bay - its crew say to fish for mackerel.
That evening, the first arrests were made.
At
this point though, the drugs had not been discovered.
This happened the
following day, when a member of the public called to say he had spotted
11 multicoloured bags floating in Freshwater Bay.
This timeframe, Ms Bolton says, was crucial.
At
the time the fishing boat was said to have hidden the drugs in
Freshwater Bay, two officers from Hampshire police were watching from
the cliff tops as part of the police operation.
In the officers'
logs before the drugs were found, they recorded someone on the fishing
boat throwing six or seven items overboard at intervals - which the
fishermen say could have been rubbish bags full of old bait.
But
the next day, after the drugs were discovered, the police lookouts
changed the official log - as they are allowed to do - to clarify what
they saw.
In the new version they reported 10 to 12 items the size
of a holdall, tied together in a line and deployed from the boat
followed by a red floating buoy - a description that almost exactly
matched the drugs that were picked up by the police boat.

Freshwater Bay, where the drugs were found

The two police surveillance officers then told different accounts in court.
One
said he was convinced of the significance of the holdalls at the time;
the other said he thought little of it until after the drugs were found
the next day.
As a result, the new defence team claims the accounts cannot be relied upon.
"These
are officers that are trained to get the details right every single
time - and we are not talking about small details," Ms Bolton explains.
"We are talking about big changes, about what they saw and also where they saw it from."

Police footage

At trial, both police lookouts were adamant they had seen 10 to 12 sacks thrown off the fishing boat along with a buoy.
After
making the first log entry, they said they had seen extra bags thrown
off the boat, so the amended version was the full picture of everything
they had recorded that day.
The Independent Police Complaints
Commission did look into the case and, though it found inconsistencies
in the officers' evidence, decided it was not enough to show they had
fabricated their accounts.
Complaints against the two officers were
dismissed.
Hampshire Police also said they had no ongoing complaints relating to this investigation.

Fresh appeal?

Soca,
now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA), said at the time that
the operation had stopped a huge amount of cocaine from reaching the
streets of the UK.
Ms Bolton's new evidence has been passed to
the criminal cases review commission, which will decide if the five men
can launch a fresh appeal.
She believes there was a motive for Soca to implicate the five men.

The view from Cowes, Isle of Wight

"At this stage in the investigation it appears Operation Disorient
really needed to get a result. They had committed a lot of resources to
this investigation and needed someone to be responsible, and they
started focusing on the fishing boat.
"From then on, they
interpreted all evidence that came before them as pointing to guilt, and
meanwhile ignored or didn't seek other evidence which pointed in the
opposite direction."
The NCA said it could not comment while that investigation was ongoing.
Hampshire Police said: "It would not be appropriate to comment on operational matters led by another agency [the NCA]."